They said numbers never lie.
But numbers never had a tongue.
They simply existed —
obedient, unfeeling,
waiting to be wielded
by those who could speak louder than the truth.
More fiction has been written in numbers
than alphabets ever dared to imagine.
Because alphabets ask questions.
Numbers only answer in acceptable affirmatives.
From the moment breath first finds the body,
you are measured.
By weight.
By time.
By your position in the queue of births.
By the seconds between your first gasp
and someone else's relief.
You are not named first.
You are numbered.
Then they teach you to count:
Steps, syllables, sins.
They measure your worth
in recitations remembered,
in straightened spines,
and parchments inked with someone else’s dreams.
You don't learn to speak.
You learn to tick boxes.
You are taught to revere the measurable
and mistrust the invisible.
Love becomes a ledger.
You give what you cannot name,
but they ask: How much? How often? How long?
Grief becomes arithmetic.
Tears are expected
to dry by the seventh day.
Faith becomes division.
Heaven is a fraction.
Hell, a sum of missteps.
The divine?
Tallied in offerings,
recorded in rituals
that must be numbered to count.
History remembers conquerors
not by their cruelty,
but by their empires' real estate
stretched in acres,
and the number of bones
buried into boundaries.
Wars are rarely remembered for why —
only for how many.
Peace, too, becomes a number.
How long it lasted.
How briefly it lived.
How quickly it failed.
And democracy —
that beautiful fiction —
survives only in deception by numbers.
Its worshippers don’t bleed truth,
they swing words for swords
and believe ballot boxes are truth serums laced in justice.
They scream liberty
in decimals,
forgetting that the loudest majorities
once cheered crucifixions.
Because in democracies,
truth is just a number
that failed to win majority.
Even silence is no longer sacred.
It is timed,
evaluated,
spoken about in retrospect
as if it too
were something to be audited.
The soul?
They say that weighs too.
As much as
A pinch of dust.
A leaf’s tremble in the wind.
a question left unanswered in an awkwardly quiet room.
And yet —
this is what becomes of you.
Your legacy becomes a list.
Your name becomes a data point.
Your existence becomes
a record waiting to be filed.
But who measures the tremble in a voice
that says goodbye without saying it?
Who counts the ache
in a mother’s back
from carrying a child
no longer alive?
What scale weighs a father’s silence?
Sacrilege cannot be quantified.
So the world ignores it.
Because numbers are neat.
And neatness is comforting.
And comfort is always preferable to truth.
So remember this, if you must:
Numbers are the lies
alphabets couldn’t convince you to buy.
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